"The New EC2 High Storage Instance Family"<p><a href="http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/12/the-new-ec2-high-storage-instance-family.html" rel="nofollow">http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/12/the-new-ec2-high-storage-...</a><p>"
<i>The High Storage Eight Extra Large (hs1.8xlarge) instances are a great fit for applications that require high storage depth and high sequential I/O performance. Each instance includes 117 GiB of RAM, 16 virtual cores (providing 35 ECU of compute performance), and 48 TB of instance storage across 24 hard disk drives capable of delivering up to 2.4 GB per second of I/O performance.</i><p><i>This instance family is designed for data-intensive applications that require high storage density and high sequential I/O -- data warehousing, log processing, and seismic analysis (to name a few). We know that these applications can generate or consume tremendous amounts of data and that you want to be able to run them on EC2.
The storage on this instance family is local, and has a lifetime equal to that of the instance. You should think of these instances as building blocks that you can use to build a complete storage system. You should build a degree of redundancy into your storage architecture (e.g. RAID 1, 5, or 6) and you should use a fault-tolerant file system like HDFS or Gluster. Of course, you should also back up your data to Amazon S3 for increased durability.</i>
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